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‘Papermaker’ won the Wenlock Prize .
Papermaker
Water-logged with aspen, larch and fir, he takes cream pulp,
settles it down sweet as curds, paddles a long dark
oar across and rests. A quiet surface of page shores up
along the frame and ferries his thoughts to monasteries ,
a meditative marsh of birds, her wading thighs like gleaming carp.
He can almost hear a fishering of bells drifting lines across the Fens,
see Ely floating , hardly moored to any land-locked thing.
Rimed, his hands hang parchment white , salted,
drying this absence of her. She has nearly gone,
only a shoal of books and bags, bones of little things are left,
her waiting shoes bask delicate as minnows. He's watermarked,
hold him to light ,see how the press of her is printed through him.
‘Saving Icarus at Sunrise’ was first published by Visual Verse, and appears in my pamphlet ‘ Incidentals’ ( 4Word Press 2018).
Saving Icarus at Sunrise
I'm walking through a glitter of yellow dunes,
light like fused glass, sea-sheen beaching up
far far out , way past a labyrinth of morning pine.
One bright bird falling, falls, feathered flames.
Water honeycombs with heat, a sublimated sigh
in sound. Such is the hubris of cloudless wind.
Easy to flounder him unharnessed on the sand,
to strip him down to this simple alchemy of skin,
a muscled maze of gold, lashes pollened,lustrous
lines of fingers, fleece. So easy to take his mouth,
breathe him my godless air, keep him hanging there.
‘The Hardness of Quinces ‘ won the Sentinel Poetry Prize in 2021.
The Hardness of Quinces.
This mother who used to hold me, sits,
pale pod of head in the shell of her chair,
hands pleached. Word-blight, leaves falling.
I have, as fruit keeper, watched over the bletting.
Autumn's winnowed crop fattens my lap now
with forgotten butteriness, summer's mislaid
light, all is silent save a sigh of patient cupboards.
Kitchen cloistered , windows steam-blossomed,
as if this weighted scent of fruit is incense, rite.
Her knife still knows its November role ,slits, cores,
glints a juiceless path hard as bone. Skin. See how her
quinced hands , are peppered, downy with ageless bloom.
A stutter of sugar, honey shirring warmth, old appled air,
she leans like a weathered tree, stirring quiet the sweet
and sour of it all, so our quince time must slowly pass .
How soft the cooking ends, how tender this reddened
flesh slips. Fingers flutter an emptying dish, and I know
she searches some lost face in the well of her gentle spoon.
‘That Day’ was published by The Phare.
That Day
found me lip-reading the sea from my kitchen window,
trying to make out its sprint of gleaming dashes
some sort of illegible morse drifting in from the north.
Usually here, there’s a soundscape of high birds and lapping
coast, never those strange bass organ-chords grinding, a deep
underscore lamenting through the firth.
But then it was the first day, only 24 hours after he’d left.
Light was passing as if through silver-coated plate, changing
my stone-washed walls to shifting shadows. A few people
were frozen negatives on the strand, heads turned darkly seaward.
Then like a castaway on an interrupted journey, an immensity
of lost ice islanded the channel, hung there in a weight of blue,
shut away my sun. Perhaps it was the berg’s aching lines ,retraction,
loosening, how it slowly decomposed, perhaps it was its cold void,
the way it held its noise within that made me fear. I swear I saw
his whiteness loom against the glass, a fist, my indoor sea sinking.
But then it was the first day, only 24 hours after he’d left.